Why are so many client/server projects late, over budget, and under-featured?

It must be the technology. After all, IS mainframe development projects never come in late, over budget and under-featured, do they?

I wrote a piece on empowerment a few months back. Several managers responded with stories of employees who chronically make excuses and duck responsibility.

When IS management blames its inability to deliver on technology, it’s time to look at who’s really unwilling to shoulder responsibility. IS gained a reputation for late system delivery long before client/server technology – one reason client/server technology created excitement was its potential for reducing development time. Why has it failed to do so? Last week we looked at methodologies. This week, the issue is project management – probably the key difference between successful and failed projects.

Since I’m at best an adequate project manager, I called in an expert, Terry Westropp, for a second opinion. (Full Disclosure: Terry is a fellow employee and senior project manager at Perot Systems.)

Qualifications? Terry manages real projects of significant size and scope, on both mainframes and client/server technology, and brings them in on-time and within budget.

What differentiates successful projects from the others? Here are some guidelines:

Scope Control: Everyone hates it, but at some point everyone has to agree to freeze the design. Last week we talked about using staged releases to take the sting out of this. “Scope creep” is a big reasons for late system delivery. Resist it, or rebuild the project schedule each time you add a new feature and get every stakeholder to buy into the new schedule.

Regular, Concrete, Measurable Results: Your project plan must call for every member of the project team, every week to deliver something tangible. Tangible means you can point to it, touch it, use it, and verify its existence. You can’t define the milestone for a week as 70% completion of some function or other, because nobody can verify “70% complete”. With weekly tangible results, you’ll never be more than a week late without knowing about it.

Weekly Status Meetings: Every team member presents this week’s results as compared to the plan. The team discusses both expected unexpected problems, and unexpected unexpected problems. (Example of the former: learning how to use a new middleware technology to access a remote database – you expect to do some putzing around in this situation. Example of the latter: the development tool blows up when you try to join more than 15 tables in one report.)

(Key success factor: Ask, and insist on an answer, to the magic question, “What are you going to do about it?” for every late delivery. This isn’t a rude question – it’s a matter of one professional asking another how they’re going to get their part of the project back on track. The answer may be long hours, it may involve weekend work, or it may involve rescheduling, if a task really was mis-estimated. Whatever the solution, though, it has to be explicit. “I’ll keep working on it,” isn’t an explicit solution.)

Team Buy-in to the Plan: Anyone can load some project management software and create a Gantt chart. If the project team doesn’t believe a schedule is realistic, the whole project can turn into an emotional pressure-cooker. One solution: parcel out project responsibilities to the team. Everyone plans their own delivery schedules. The project manager integrates them so all dependencies are accounted for.